Over the weekend, an image of one of NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce RTX cards leaked online, fueling many rumor mills across the world. With a radically new cooler design, and RTX 3080 clearly stamped on it, the photo has people wondering if it is an authentic leak of the unreleased GPU. Despite not being fully verified, fans even went on to create professional-looking renders based on the one image.
NVIDIA has now begun an internal investigation into the matter. New information regarding this has been brought forth by Igor Wallosek of Igor’s Lab. Companies subcontracting for NVIDIA, Foxconn, and BYD (Build Your Dreams) seem to be under the microscope. It is suspected they could be the source of the leaked photo. Rumors are that not even NVIDIA’s own product or sales managers have seen this new design yet. This too lends credence to the suspected source for the photo.
All of this is happening barely a month after NVIDIA’s GTC 2020 Keynote with CEO Jensen Huang. The event focused on NVIDIA’s new 7 nm Ampere architecture, which is already gaining a foothold in data centers. This node is thought to be the basis for the upcoming GeForce RTX lineup as well. It is believed that NVIDIA is planning to launch its next GeForce RTX GPU in the fall of 2020. Igor’s Lab also reports that this timeline would permit design changes, if NVIDIA desires, to invalidate the accuracy of this photo leak. NVIDIA’s first generation of RTX GPUs brought real-time ray tracing to gaming along with AI-powered DLSS. Many are waiting to see what improvements Ampere will bring to the next generation.